The Journal’s visibility and impact remain extremely high. The articles published in the Journal in 2005 and 2006 were cited 10,473 times during 2007, a total that ranks first among business and finance journals and fourth among all economics journals (behind the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Journal of Political Economy). Our impact factor (cites during 2007 to articles published in 2005 and 2006, divided by the total number of articles published in those two years) is 3.353, which ranks first among business and finance journals and fourth among all economics journals.

Turnaround time remains good, with almost 70% of the editorial decisions taking less than 60 days and only about 14% taking over 100 days. Table IV provides details on turnaround for the editorial decisions made during 2008. Figure 1 compares 2007 turnaround to 2008. Table V provides information on the acceptance and rejection rates. While the number of acceptances was lower in 2008 than 2007, there were more accepted papers in 2008 than in 2006. The backlog of unpublished accepted articles continues to run slightly longer than a year. The average length of the review process, coupled with the publication backlog, produces a significant period during which the editor who handled an article is not necessarily the one whose name appears on the masthead when that article is published. Of the articles published in 2008, about 1.25% (1 paper) were handled by Rick Green and 76.25% (61 papers) by Rob Stambaugh.

As has been said before, the Journal reflects the collaborative efforts of a great many people. My Co-Editor, John Graham, and the Associate Editors do a wonderful job in filling the role I have asked of them. Last year the Journal relied on over 700 referees who, with few exceptions, made time in busy schedules to provide the type of diligent and prompt feedback that continues to play a vital role in the Journal’s success. (Appendix A lists the individuals who refereed for the Journal of Finance during the year.) Clearly, you, the members of the Association, value the Journal highly, and it has been a great honor and privilege for me to have been entrusted with its care.

We continue to work with BEPress in making refinements to the system, and I believe the electronic system has proven to serve our needs rather well. One of the most important reasons for a smooth functioning of our journal is our editorial assistant, Wendy Washburn, who is a huge asset to the Journal. Not only is Wendy vital in keeping the many day-to-day activities of the editorial office running smoothly, as many of you have probably experienced as authors and reviewers, but she very ably supervises the copyediting and the pre-publication interface with Blackwell.

We have made some operational changes. First, we moved our email accounts to an outside service provider. This means that the Journal is not tied to any particular university email system and this will provide both continuity and greater reliability. Second, we have established a new backup protocol. All files are internally synced across multiple computers and then securely and redundantly backed up using two online backup services that provide historical versioning.

There is one important editorial change. Almost all accepted papers now have an Internet Appendix (IA). The IA resides on the www.afajof.org site. The idea of the IA is to provide a way for authors to publish material that might have a more specialized audience in a place associated with the Journal of Finance paper – but without the space constraint. Examples of material include: tables and/or figures already in the paper that are deemed expendable, unabridged versions of tables that appear in the paper (perhaps with extra columns and rows), supplementary tables and/or figures that are provided in the response to the referee report, some but not necessarily all of the regular appendix materials, datasets, some proofs (and given there is unlimited space authors are encouraged not to skip steps in proofs), supplementary derivations, audio and video files, and computer code. There are no longer references in any Journal of Finance paper to “untabulated,” “unreported,” or “results available on request.” The IA also includes a convention for citing the IA material that involves a formal citation to the Journal of Finance article. The IA should result in leaner Journal of Finance papers and, at the same time, provide more information for interested readers.

Each year the Journal awards a number of prizes for articles that it has published. The eligible papers for the 2008 prizes were all those published in the six issues of the Journal from December 2007 through October 2008. The Smith Breeden prizes, which recognize articles in all areas except corporate finance, consist of one first prize of $10,000 and two distinguished-paper prizes of $5000 each. The Brattle awards, which recognize articles in corporate finance, consist of one first prize of $10,000 and two distinguished-paper prizes of $5000. The Associate Editors nominated the papers. We then formed a list of finalists and then the Associate Editors voted for the prize winners. Editorial Assistant Wendy Washburn handled the balloting. This year there were eleven finalists for the Smith Breeden prizes and nine finalists for the Brattle prizes. Appendices B and C list the winning papers as well as the finalists. On behalf of the Journal, I have congratulated all of the authors of the nominated papers. The prizes were announced at the AFA Business Meeting in San Francisco.